Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit either.

For people allergic to wool, one's heart can only bleed.

One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up; one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground.

Now comes what I perhaps inflatedly call my philosophy of knitting. Like many philosophies, it is hard to express in a few words. Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness.

I can knit. I knit all year, day in, day out. It is my passion, and I rarely knit the same thing twice the same way.

Now, let us all take a deep breath and forge on into the future; knitting at the ready.

Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried.